


foot et gown, dit la Princesse

by Nibelung



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Consensual Underage Sex, Eye Trauma, F/M, Feet, Foot Fetish, Gang Rape, Gen, Leia comes from a planet of space fundamentalists, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, Underage Rape/Non-con, Underage Sex, also her feet, and learns to appreciate sunsets, and threesomes, by blowing up planets, eventually she grows out of that narrow mindset, fanfic writers for letting star wars characters say "fuck", leia/feet OTP, like most of my SW fics, putting the "cinder" in Cinderella, the star wars foot fetish fic no one asked for, this is a Leia-centric fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 22:21:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30112914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nibelung/pseuds/Nibelung
Summary: Leia Organa wants to take down a fascist Empire, mourn as best she can for her lost homeworld, and find herself a comfortable pair of shoes. All of these are tall orders, but that last one is especially tricky.AU based largely on the 1975 Star Wars third draft.
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	foot et gown, dit la Princesse

She hated going barefoot. Always had.

Organa Prime had a cool climate, with snow-capped mountains and icy rivers running down to the cities, and grass that was tough and spiky, springing out from amidst the sharp rocks of the glacier-tilled soil. The sky was always the leaden gray color of week-old winter snow, year-round, even at sunrise and sunset. And there was always something unpleasantly cold or slimy or sharp underfoot. Hence why Leia had always hated not wearing shoes, and kept her feet firmly covered as much as possible.

Fortunately, being royalty meant Leia never had any of her physical needs go unfulfilled. Her mother, the Viceroy, and her father, the Consort, were, as Leia herself would one day be, deeply involved in the nascent Rebellion. Their time was precious, so if their daughter could be kept satisfied with something as simple as a pair of shoes, why not? They had only to speak a word and it would be done.

From a young age, therefore, Leia had always had the finest shoemakers on hand, willing and eager to provide their wares to the heir apparent, for the right price. Leather moccasins that fit her feet perfectly for day wear. Sturdy hiking boots to provide traction while walking the mountain trails. Elegant high heels when she put in an appearance at diplomatic dinners. Light silk slippers for wearing to bed.

Even in the palace’s swimming pools, she never went without her trusty water-shoes.

So things went, up until her sixteenth birthday, when she left school and started going on missions for the Rebellion in earnest.

And then, a scant few months later, came Vader.

When Vader brought her to the overbridge of Alderaan Base to speak by holocomm with Governor Tarkin – who had been the warden of the Empire’s Alderaan prison until his recent appointment to command the Death Star – the most recent torture session she’d undergone was a flogging with a lightwhip.

They’d torn the bodice from her gown, just above the belt, before the first stroke. So she faced Tarkin’s ghostly image naked from the waist up, hands bound behind her, with a back that weeped blood.

Her world blew up. Her soul imploded.

And later, sometime after they’d returned her to her cell, the prison guards came back in, shutting the door behind them.

They gave her skirt back to her afterwards, in the next “official” torture session. Bloodied. Cum-stained. Soiled.

Her boots stayed gone.

Rescue, as it happened, came when she was floating upside-down in a paralytic force-field in her cell, riding the high as the last of the truth serum worked its way out of her blood. The old Jedi Ben Kenobi had masterminded her deliverance. That little R2 unit had succeeded after all, Force bless him.

Yet rather than Ben Kenobi, it was a short, suntanned youth in stolen stormtrooper armor who barged into her cell without so much as knocking first.

Luke Skywalker, he called himself. Strange name, that. Old royalty from one of the Core dynasties of bygone days. He certainly didn’t look it. Then an enormous eight-foot-tall furry Woozie (Woonie? Wookiee?) barged in too and shot the controls of the force field.

She fell abruptly downward and if it hadn’t been for the fur-covered Woozie catching her, Leia’s head would probably have split open on the hard durasteel floor like a melon. Instead she just flashed everyone in the room – now including a smuggler with far too much mouth on him – as her skirt bunched around her hips.

If they’d had time, she might have stolen one of the armor sets from the troopers her rescuers had killed on their way in. But another squad was already blocking the exit, and they shoved a blaster into her hands, and there was no time –

– and then, for lack of a better idea, she blasted open the entrance to the garbage chute. The worst it could do was kill them. She’d already suffered a far more personal horror, the sort of thing that would have led her schoolmates to dub her a “scarlet woman”… if they’d still been alive.

Force, it was vile in the trash compactor. She could feel broken bits of wiring, metal pipes, and other unnamable things beneath her feet. Brown liquid sloshed around her calves, decomposing organic matter and discarded personal items floating in a layer of scum on top. She could feel the organic stuff below the surface also, food or used tissues or whatnot squishing between her toes in a way that made her stomach turn. Probably there was excrement here too. Maybe some of it was hers.

How in the nine hells did this Chewbacca fellow go about everywhere without shoes on?

She bit back a curse as a sharp pain stabbed into her foot. One of the metal bits underfoot in this mess was jagged. It had _cut_ her. Oh gods, her foot was bleeding out into this toxic cesspool of waste. She’d have to scrub it clean with disinfectant once she got off this hellish cloud-ball and went home – _not home_ , she thought with an awful twinge in her gut, _your place is_ _wherever the Rebels are now, you can never go **home**_ –

Luke gave a strangled cry of surprise and disappeared under the water’s opaque surface, and suddenly they had bigger things to worry about.

She made sure to clean out the cut on her foot as thoroughly as possible in the _Falcon_ ’s ‘fresher, along with the other wounds the Imperials had given her during her stay on Alderaan. The ones she wasn’t keeping between herself and the Rebel medical droids, at least.

Luke and Han helped her with that. She would’ve preferred Ben, but he was convalescing in the medical bunk from the wound Vader had given him, and would have to stay there for the duration of the trip to Yavin’s fourth moon.

When they finally reached Yavin, she was wearing a shirt and pants she’d borrowed from Han’s wardrobe, but no shoes, because his spare boots were all too big to fit her. His socks, at least, she could make work with some effort, pulling them on tightly so they came halfway up her calves, then rolling the loose upper sections down around her ankles.

The Rebel base didn’t show up on their scanners, and Leia had never been there before, so she didn’t know where precisely to land. All she had was a vague memory of the general sector on one continent that it was part of, from a map Mother had shown her before she’d left Organa Prime ( _for the last time_ , her brain reminded her).

The jungle canopy was sufficiently dense that, in the absence of a landing spot cleared of vegetation, the _Falcon_ couldn’t touch down without suffering damage. They’d have to use the lifepods, and call the ship in remotely once they’d reached the base proper.

The lifepods landed relatively safely, though Ben had to help her down from the tree hers had landed in, and Luke nearly got stung by a poisonous tree-spider before he remembered his red Jedi laser sword and killed it.

But walking through the jungle towards where Leia guessed the Rebel base was? A different story.

With all the thorny plants, waterlogged soil, and treacherous vines waiting to trip up unsuspecting explorers, Leia was desperately wishing for a proper pair of shoes.

Once she was nearly swallowed up by a slimy bog that ate one of her borrowed socks. The other sock had its heel and toe sections shredded by the time Rebel scouts emerged from the trees, guns drawn to face this mysterious, bewilderingly incompetent invasion force.

 _Finally_ , Leia thought. _Salvation._

Here were fellow Rebels. Starfighters to blow up that damn Death Star. Clothing. Medical treatment.

Shoes.

She was right about everything except that last one.

Since Leia had never visited Yavin Base before, she’d never brought any of her spare clothing here for storage. Now Organa Prime and the _Tantivy IV_ were both so much space dust. All she had were the borrowed clothes on her back.

The Rebels here gave her almost everything she asked for: fatigues, a bed, a proper medical check – including a morning-after pill that she requested in private from the medical droids.

What they couldn’t give her, not even after the Death Star was destroyed, was a pair of shoes.

Quartering tried its best, but all it could source was the black boots starpilots wore: big and bulky and impossible to walk in, or small and painful and impossible to walk in. The generals all made do with boots they’d brought from their homeworlds.

Leia’s homeworld was a pile of charred cinders floating around in space.

She never talked with anyone about what had happened to her on Alderaan Base. She was afraid what would happen to her reputation if the other Rebel leaders learned she’d let herself be raped.

Mores died harder than planets.

With Yavin Base exposed, they had to move to their fallback: Phiro, a swamp planet.

The local terrain here wasn’t any more conducive to borrowing Han’s socks. So she went barefoot, not by choice, hating it every second. Her feet were always black from the duracrete floors of the base, or covered in mud from the marshy terrain outside.

The swamp mud squished ickily beneath her soles when she went outside, and stayed stuck between her toes afterwards. When she sat down with the other brass for strategy meetings, she always tried to arrive first and leave last, and kept her legs hidden in shame firmly under the table.

But she put up with it. Sometimes she even went for walks in the swamp, because the planet’s atmospheric gases gave the sky an attractive glow during sunrise and sunset. Frankly, it was spectacular. Well worth some mud between her toes.

One time, after a particularly stressful strategy meeting, Luke and Han followed her when she went outdoors. Things spiraled from there, until suddenly she was pushing Luke into a particularly deep mud puddle. He stretched out a hand, asking her to pull him out. Oh no. She wasn’t falling for that one.

So he grabbed her foot instead.

Before long all three of them were engaged in a playful three-way wrestling match in the mud, and when they finally crawled out as darkness was setting in, they were all covered head to foot in black swamp slime. They spent the whole walk back to base arguing about which of their bedrooms was going to pay the price. (Hers, Leia said, settling it by pulling rank. A leader of armies must make sacrifices.)

That was the first time Leia Organa had ever had consensual sex.

Luke and Han spent days afterwards cleaning the mud out of their boots. Meanwhile Leia went happily about her business, and tried to ignore the black footprints she left in her wake.

Though sometimes, like when she had to talk to Ben Kenobi about something or other, she really wished she had just _one_ pair of shoes.

Two years on from the destruction of the Death Star, as the Empire’s net of surveillance tightened, the Phiro base inevitably had to be abandoned, as did its successor on the airless seventh moon of Eulai. (That particular nine months taught Leia that she did, in fact, suffer from occasional claustrophobia.) With possible locations for a new Rebel headquarters dwindling by the day, it was Leia who made the final call in choosing Hoth. It seemed ideal: remote, unsettled, livable for humanoids, but with a climate harsh enough that no one else would go there.

She regretted it as soon as she debarked from the transport that brought her there. She thought she could tolerate snowy weather since she’d grown up on Organa Prime. But even when she’d summited Mount Isok’kut on her fifteenth birthday, she’d never felt this bone-chilling, energy-sapping, hells-blasted _cold_.

 _Livable_ did not mean _pleasant_. Or even _put-up-with-able_.

Since conditions at the new base demanded mass orders of mukluks for all personnel, Quartering had finally managed to locate her a pair of boots that fitted.

Leia had thought this thing at least would be a relief, a welcome return in some small way to how things used to be on her lost homeworld: a return to _normal_.

They weren’t.

Moisture from the ever-present snow and ice tended to collect on her clothing, working its way downward as the day wore on and puddling in her boots. No matter how many layers of socks she wore, Leia’s feet were always cold.

And worst of all, the tauntauns they used for reconnaissance patrols had fleas.

Which meant she couldn’t even wear fur-lined boots – the only ones that kept her feet from feeling like blocks of ice surgically attached to her legs – without being plagued by parasites. And how the hell could you enjoy having sex if you were constantly being bitten by fleas? She didn’t have any answers for that one, nor did Han or Luke. And she couldn’t ask anybody else without revealing she was currently sleeping out of wedlock with not one but two men: something her parents on Organa Prime could have had her disinherited for. She was still trying to find an answer when the Empire discovered their base.

In the aftermath of the ground battle and frantic evacuation, as the _Falcon_ raced away from a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers, Leia took the opportunity to drop her flea-ridden fur boots down the waste chute. Though she figured she could still use the socks after a good washing.

When they landed on Kaaleita, its ever-courteous baronial administrator Lando Kadar gave her, free of charge, a wardrobe full of mind-bogglingly elegant dresses. Plus shoes to match.

Every single pair a set of high heels.

She’d forgotten how insanely much they could hurt. Her toes felt pinched and her insteps were rubbed raw. And how in the Force had she ever managed to walk in these blasted things, anyway?

Then… Vader. The demon that haunted her nightmares.

The Empire’s armored goons once more stripped her naked, held her down, and started fucking her in every orifice they could fit themselves into. The last time, on Alderaan, she’d struggled till one of them clocked her over the head and she passed out. This time she just went limp. It didn’t matter. Whatever the fortunes of the Alliance, she and her friends were lost. There was only one infinitesimal, ridiculously silly thing Leia could take comfort in, and she clung to it like a drowning woman on a life raft.

At least those damned high heels were gone.

Like some angel out of old Organian legends, Luke showed up to save her. Then he went off to face Darth Vader and nearly got himself killed, or captured, or whatever Vader’s sick brain had in store for him. Whatever fate Vader intended, Luke would have been utterly at the Dark Lord’s mercy, had Ben Kenobi not journeyed to Kaaleita with him. Having busied himself causing chaos elsewhere in the city, Ben arrived to distract Vader only in the nick of time. He saved Luke’s life, and lost his own.

And Luke was left injured, missing an arm, hanging from one of the city’s weathervanes over the churning ocean of strange deep-green fog below. It was Leia who heard his call through the Force, and had Han turn the _Falcon_ around to rescue him. When they got back at last to the Rebel fleet, they had a new recruit in Lando, but Ben Kenobi was gone, and the rest of them were more or less wounded in body and soul.

After the dust had settled, Leia didn’t even bother asking Quartering for new boots. The only shoes they’d ever found for her that fitted worth a damn were those ryll-sucking mukluks… and all of them, fur or no fur, had been left behind on Hoth.

They could stay there, as far as she was concerned. That damn snowball planet had brought her nothing but trouble.

And then it turned out she’d come down with spacer’s lumps. A particularly nasty variety that got more painful with each new infectee in the chain. And it was highly transmissible. Even with a full course of antibiotics it would take nearly a year to clear up. No vaginal sex, no oral sex, no deep kissing, for an entire year.

There wasn’t any hiding it this time. She’d been raped. Everyone knew it. On Organa Prime, it would have meant no one would ever see her as anything but a harlot, royalty or not. But Organa Prime was space dust. And even before Kaaleita, she’d already flouted her lost homeworld’s mores in more ways than she could count. She might as well die honest about it.

But if she was really being honest, her libido risked dying long before she did. A whole year of nothing but handjobs got old around month two.

She couldn’t help it if she wanted to experiment a little.

Six months in, she was an expert on footjobs. She also liked to play with Luke and Han under the briefing room table. It was so fun watching them squirm awkwardly, trying to feign nonchalance in front of the other Rebels, as she prodded with her toes at the growing bulges in their trousers.

She’d come a long way from the young naïve princess who’d believed her mother when she said sex outside of marriage was a vice of the corrupt galaxy outside, one that had no place among the denizens of their own nobler world.

Leia had had sex. Leia had been raped. She still treasured her parents’ memory – but she had her own opinions on what was a vice and what wasn’t.

Nearly a year later and she was still on those damn meds. At this point she’d fuck a tree if the doctors cleared her for it. But that had dropped way down her list of concerns.

Han went back to Luke’s homeworld, Sullust, to meet up with the crimelord Oxus, who’d said he was thinking about throwing in with the Rebellion. Though her burgeoning Force senses warned her of a likely trap, Leia authorized the meeting on the grounds that any self-professed enemy of the Empire could potentially be their friend. Besides, she trusted Han to find his way out if things went sour.

It was, of course, a trap.

Han nearly got away. But one of Oxus’ bounty hunters, Fett, proved just a little too clever. Set up an ambush with a razorwire. Han lost a leg. Rather than risk Chewie too being captured trying to carry him to safety, the big galoot stayed behind and let the bounty hunters take him, while Chewbacca ran back to the _Falcon_ and escaped to tell Leia.

It was Leia who, drawing on a recent Intelligence report, came up with the scheme to impersonate a recently-deceased bounty hunter whose armor they’d acquired, one K’shnarr, an alien who always wore a helmet to breathe in oxygen atmospheres. She’d walk right in to Oxus’ palace, with Chewbacca on a leash, and no one would be the wiser. In the event, the leash went by the wayside. She liked having arms.

The hard part proved to be getting Han out of his prison cell. He didn’t trust her in the armor, hadn’t heard that K’shnarr had been killed. She tried telling him it was her, Leia, but in his wounded and feverish state he didn’t believe her. For all he knew it could be Fett under that suit. Time was short. She knew the other guards would soon notice the two she’d knocked out, over by the stairway up to the palace’s other levels.

The Force warned her, before she removed her helmet, _don’t do this, don’t do this_. And she told it, _why the fuck not? He’s not going to go willingly unless I prove to him who I really am._

So she removed her helmet. And then it all went wrong.

The harem attendants stripped her, bathed her, plucked her stray hairs, and ultimately brought out a laughably indecent “outfit” for her to wear for her first day – and night – with the crime boss.

A red silk loincloth with two panels in front and back, a gaudy necklace, and a pair of boots with high heels. If Leia had still been that sixteen-year-old princess aboard the _Tantivy IV_ looking for Ben Kenobi, she would have dropped dead of shame.

But that princess died on Alderaan. Leia Organa, age nineteen and queen of nowhere, had lived long enough to have her modesty torn away from her. She donned the so-called outfit grudgingly. Most of it.

“Uh… do you have any other shoes that go with this?”

“He picked this out himself. It’s those shoes or nothing.”

Nothing it was.

She felt herself blush at the way Han gaped at her bare chest when they dragged him out of the dungeon cells. Then Luke came in dressed to the nines, lightsaber at the ready, threatening vengeance if his friends weren’t released. And he gaped at her too, though he hid it better.

By now those two were her best friends, her family. Her home.

They’d seen her naked countless times, but it was nice to know she still had it where it counted. Especially after a year of abstinence from the hard stuff.

Her blush went all the way down to her toes.

The crew and courtiers of the sail barge were distracted by the prospect of Luke and Han’s entertaining demise proving neither entertaining, nor fatal, except to themselves.

By now Leia had learned that whenever general chaos was happening, it was an excellent time if one needed to do some ancillary murder.

As she choked the gargantuan Oxus with the very slave collar he’d put around her neck, the crimelord evinced some serious difficulty breathing, but he wasn’t quite as dead yet as Leia needed him to be. Oxus threw out his four short stubby arms, reaching for a fallen blaster that lay just out of range, and after some quick consideration, Leia realized the problem here was leverage.

She clambered barefoot up the Xacan’s slimy bulk. Her feet slipped and slid against the frog-like layers of outer mucus that coated Oxus’ brightly patterned skin, but she realized she probably could never have climbed up this fleshly mountain at all in those stupid boots he’d chosen for her. Certainly not with those heels.

The Xacan crimelord thrashed, desperate now. He was definitely choking in a manner that would be fatal soon. Too bad.

Leia took the opportunity to stick her big toe into his right eye.

She felt a wet pop as the Xacan’s massive eyeball burst like a cracked egg, ocular fluid running out of the socket, all over her foot, between her toes.

She grinned.

Served him right. That fucker.

With a last colossal groan, Oxus heaved over and died.

Leia felt herself hurled toward the ceiling of the sail barge cabin by the enormous crimelord’s death throes. She lost hold of the chain she’d used to strangle him, and tried desperately to grab on to something to arrest her fall, without success. A low-hanging glowlamp swung from a support strut, and she narrowly avoided having one of its ornamental prongs catch on her chain and choke her to death too.

She was halfway back down to the floor, arms and legs braced for impact, when she realized she’d stopped in midair.

The lower hem of her loincloth’s rear panel had caught on that stupid ornamental prong.

It was Sullustan wormsilk, incredibly strong. She couldn’t tear it loose with her bare hands. She couldn’t summon the blaster on the floor into her hand, since her collar had Force inhibitors installed in it – stolen Imperial tech, no doubt. And from her awkward position, hanging from the ceiling with all four limbs outstretched and her bare ass on display for anyone to see, she couldn’t reach anything that would cut her down.

Maybe the Force was punishing her for having relished Oxus’ death a little too much.

From behind her, she could hear the _clunk-clunk-clunk_ of a metal object rolling down the durasteel ladder from the upper deck. Part of a turret gun, she guessed. Maybe even an old-style cannonball.

Nope. As the noisy object rolled to a stop in front of her, she realized it was Fett’s severed head. Even dead that bastard kept his helmet on.

There followed the sounds of boots descending the ladder, and a distinctive hum that she’d recognize anywhere. Because it featured so strongly in her memories. Her nightmares. (Those dreams where Luke was explaining to her all the reasons for that open panel in the front on the new line of Sevartiimian swim trunks. Why didn’t they make them that way in real life, she wondered?)

Sure enough, it was Luke, lit lightsaber in hand.

“Hey, Luke,” she said, with a _can-you-believe-this_ wave, as he came round to help her. “I’ve got a situation…”

Han was up and about in short order – albeit he was still having a bit of trouble getting used to his new droid leg – and soon he was part of the Rebels’ mission to blow up the Red Spear. The Emperor’s top scientists were turning the lifeless fifth moon of Ton-Muund into a weapon even more powerful than the Death Star, one that could destroy entire solar systems from afar.

Intelligence reports indicated the first target would be Alderaan. Vader and the Emperor, the Sith Lord and the general-turned-dictator, shared a galaxy but were from different universes. They never had trusted each other, and their latent hostility finally seemed likely to erupt into open war.

Han and Chewie’s job was to infiltrate the Imperial Palace on Ton-Muund and get rid of the cloaking device that currently shielded the moon, so the Alliance fleet could blow it up. If they failed, it would surely be the end of the Rebellion.

And Luke and Leia would be the first to die. Because, with heavy hearts, they had gone to Alderaan to face Darth Vader, whose own plot to replace the Emperor with a docile clone had nearly reached fruition.

Leia was still a novice with a lightsaber—she’d built it herself, using iodium quarried from Organa Prime, rather than the slightly sturdier duirgarium Luke had chosen for his new sword—but she was already showing a precocious grasp of the Force. And as far as they knew, they were the only two even half-trained Jedi left. So they headed to Alderaan. The city in the clouds. The Imperial prison.

The picture of Heaven and the soul of Hell.

She’d worn a flight suit for the journey, including boots that, per usual, didn’t fit.

But as they were making their way up into the city from a maintenance platform on the underside, a gantry that was in poor repair gave way beneath her. Only Leia’s burgeoning Force reflexes allowed her to grab hold of a cable overhead instead of plummeting to her death.

One of her boots wasn’t so lucky. Oops. She kicked off the other one. Grabbing the cable firmly with both hands, she arced her body and made a graceful swing that turned into a leap, one that ended with her standing upright on the far side of the broken walkway.

She’d fight better with those damn things off, anyways.

If she needed to, she’d plant her bare foot on Darth Vader’s face.

As they worked their way upwards, ascending through maintenance shafts and crawl ducts, past the prisons and hangar bays into the Sith Lord’s inner sanctum, the temperature rose steadily. By the time they reached the cloning chambers next to Vader’s private tower, Leia and Luke were both sweltering.

Did Vader’s suit protect him from temperature extremes, she wondered, or was he actually a demon out of ancient myth? Or did he just like to pretend to be one?

Whatever the reason, it was stupidly hot. As they passed a waste shaft Luke pulled off his flight suit jacket and dropped it in. At the next one they came to, Leia did likewise. Leave the metaphysics and the sweaty outerwear to the dianogas.

They could even have the corpse of Vader’s nearly-ready puppet clone Emperor, if anybody bothered to clean up the mess.

She kicked the clone when it was dead. Just once. She’d probably never get the chance with the real thing. Luke raised an eyebrow at her, and she just shrugged. He could appreciate her motives.

All that was left was to break into the throne room in the topmost tower, where nobody went without Vader’s express leave, and slay the dragon.

Vader twisted his fist, and Leia’s lightsaber sputtered and flared on and off as the components inside the hilt were bent out of alignment. The metal in her hands glowed red-hot. She dropped it, but the damage was done: her palms were seared with blisters. It hurt worse than that time she’d fallen into the elderberry bush when she was five.

Now Vader slashed at his vulnerable opponent with his own saber, cutting a deep score across her chest. Leia’s left breast burned as the searing heat of the lightsaber carbonized her flesh. The fat of her breast boiled as the life-giving nipple at its peak withered to dust.

Then the Sith Lord gave her another slash, right down one side of her face.

Half Leia’s world melted away in fire.

The third stroke would have killed her. But Luke, dear Luke, with his golden lightsaber, stepped in to save her from Vader’s pale-blue blade. That duirgarium had really proved itself: Vader’s Force attack had only changed the blade’s color slightly. She’d have to use it herself next time.

Or… _was_ it Luke, really? She could sense the Dark Side rolling off him – it was how Vader felt, and Tarkin too before he died, and the Emperor when she’d met him at court functions before she came of age.

The being that was standing over her, forcing her tormentor up against the windowed wall, was not the man she knew and loved.

Yet thankfully, when he’d cut off Vader’s sword hand with his last wild stroke, and shattered one of the colossal windows in the process, Luke came back to himself.

He tucked away his lightsaber, and turned his back on the Sith Lord, hastening over to check on her where she’d fallen.

Even with one eye she could see that was a mistake. Maybe she’d taken too much joy in killing Oxus. But cruelty and pragmatism were two different things. There were some creatures it was never safe to turn your back on. Vader was one.

And now, bare moments after Luke had saved her life, it was her turn to repay the favor.

Weaponless, maimed, disfigured, she charged at the armored Sith Lord, and they both went tumbling through the shattered window of the throne room into the cloudy abyss.

The endless fall Leia had expected was broken abruptly.

Luke had her ankle grasped firmly in his droid hand.

Vader, falling himself, tried to grab hold of Leia’s shirt with his good arm. But, having been shredded earlier by his lightsaber blade, it simply came off in his hand.

Vader plummeted down through the endless clouds, a black speck shrinking into nothingness, as Leia watched, held upside-down in Luke’s durasteel grip.

(Felt a little weird, being in this position while having her ass covered.)

As Luke hauled her back up to safety, she took a moment to appreciate the view of the silvery sky beyond the gaseous white clouds.

The sun was rising. Or maybe setting. She wasn’t sure about Alderaan’s diurnal period. Whichever, she definitely hadn’t had the chance to go outside at either time of day the last time she’d been here.

As sunsets went, it was kind of crappy.

Later, in the private-beyond-private throne room they’d so thoroughly trashed, Luke pulled out a couple of mealkits he’d taken from the K-wing and offered her a ration bar.

Right now her burnt, blistered hands were too painful to so much as scratch her nose.

Instead, she plucked it from Luke’s grasp with her grime-covered toes. She made a decent job of peeling the wrapper off, even with no depth perception and no thumbs. She wolfed it down. Let the Alliance doctors worry if she’d poisoned herself with foot dirt.

She got a medal of her own this time, from Admiral Ackbar. (If she’d wanted, she could’ve had one in the medal ceremony they had back on Yavin. But there she was handing them out, and giving yourself a medal is the stuff of raving lunatics and Emperors.)

She also got a present from the people of Sacr, the Mandalorian colony world: by express request of its exile made good, Alliance general Lando Kadar, now restored as Baron of Kaaleita. A gift of flesh, to heal some of her hurts from Vader’s last impotent stabs of malice.

The Alliance’s prior strictures on cloning, inherited from the Old Republic, had relaxed somewhat in the last year of the war. But to prevent a return to the worst excesses of Clone War intrigue, the High Command decreed that all cloned flesh had to be visually distinguishable in some way from its original template. It was a stricture Leia heartily agreed with.

When Sacr’s Council of Mandalores offered their cloning vats for her use, Leia knew she could have used her influence to waive that requirement. But she was determined not to make herself a special case; she would not accept anything that didn’t meet in full the legal and ethical standards she meant to carry forward into the New Republic.

Yet even in the days of the High Mandalorians and their warmongering clone armies, some things – eyes, for instance – were never cloned. Taboo, she supposed. It meant she wouldn’t get a new eye that way. And she’d heard enough stories about the security dangers of droid eyes that she’d never let herself get one of those. Too much chance of being spied on.

So her blind eye and the lightsaber scar on her face stayed. As for her hands, they’d healed nicely enough with bacta that they didn’t need grafts of Sacrian cloned flesh. And the old lightwhip scars on her back were such a part of her now that she didn’t want to get rid of them. Some things were worth remembering, she said to herself; and every time that thought passed her mind, she remembered afresh the faces of her father and mother.

But her wounded breast was repaired with all the skill of Sacr’s storied bloodweavers. The glands and muscles were mended as if the breast had never been hurt, the flesh made whole as if Vader’s lightsaber blade had never marred its beauty.

The smooth new skin blended perfectly with her natural flesh, right up until it crested to an aureole and central peak in Alliance blue.

In bureaucratic terms, by far the easiest habitable place to set up an Organian refugee colony was Sullust. No contest.

There was hardly any local government to speak of, which meant that the administrative structure could be imposed without resistance from official authorities.

The _un_ official authorities who currently ran things were of the type the New Republic was dedicated to stamping out, so, as Head of the Organian Refugee Establishment for Settlement, Leia didn’t particularly care what they thought.

Han knew the planet well from the years he’d spent based there working for Oxus, the late crimelord. And Luke was a Sullust native – or, as he still called it using the ironic local nickname, Utapau.

She was determined to make that name straightforward.

The parched sands of the desert definitely took getting used to. Hells, it was hot enough that wearing anything above the waist quickly became something she reserved for meetings off-world.

…That might have been one reason Luke decided to build his new Jedi Academy here. In contrast, the Smugglers’ Alliance had been set up with a rotating seat of operations, so as its head Han had to be off-world frequently; but he always made sure that he was on Sullust when the anniversary of their trimarriage came around.

(Trimarriages hadn’t even been legal on Organa Prime. She’d come a long way indeed.)

Her trips off Sullust were infrequent. As one of the three Chief Executives of the New Republic, she sometimes traveled to Ton-Muund where the revived Senate was seated, but most of her business was done by holocomm. Which suited everyone all round, albeit for a rather peculiar reason. It was an odd truth of politics that many high-stakes meetings came down to literal staring contests. And in face-to-face meetings, Leia could always win a staring contest, because one of her eyes was dead-white and never blinked.

She loved the heat of the desert. No matter how the wide-open golden-hued sands burned under the rays of the binary stars, Leia could take it.

Twin suns made for truly astonishingly beautiful sunsets and sunrises.

And she always relished the way the warm grains of sand scratched the skin between her toes.

When she moved into the new viceregal palace, she brought with her several crateloads of vintage Organian clothing that she’d managed to track down across the galaxy. Some she kept in storage in the royal wardrobe, some she lent to museums, some she even dared take a knife to for the sake of adapting the piece for her own use in the desert climate.

Organa Prime might be gone, and Leia might have flouted as many of its puritanical sexual mores as she could list; but she was nonetheless determined to preserve the positive aspects of her homeworld’s legacy, not merely as dead museum pieces but as a living, breathing culture.

And yet, in all those crates, there wasn’t a single pair of shoes.

After all, she loved going barefoot.

**Author's Note:**

> yes her breast milk is blue too thanks for asking


End file.
